Website Redesign Checklist: 25 Things to Do Before Relaunching in 2026

Relaunching a website is the most underrated risk in digital. The launch party is the easy part. The two weeks after launch — when rankings shift, forms break, and someone notices the contact email never updated — are where redesigns succeed or quietly destroy a year of SEO work.

Most Sri Lankan businesses redesign their site every three to five years. That's a project worth getting right. This is the 25-point checklist we run on every Uniix Studio relaunch — for our own clients and for the audits we do on other agencies' work.

Use it as a final pre-flight inspection. Half of these are 10-minute checks. All of them together are the difference between a clean launch and three months of damage control.

Before the redesign even starts (1–4)

1. Audit what's already working

Pull a 6-month report from Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Note your top 25 pages by organic traffic, the keywords they rank for, and the bounce rate. Protect these in the redesign. The most common own-goal in a relaunch is "improving" a page that was already converting at 8% — and dropping it to 3%.

2. Document every existing URL

Crawl the live site with a free tool like Screaming Frog (500-URL free tier covers most Sri Lankan SME sites). Export the full URL list to a spreadsheet. This becomes your redirect map.

3. List every external tool currently connected

Email forms, payment gateway, chat widget, calendar booking, newsletter signup, analytics, pixels (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn), CRM, customer review widgets. Each one needs to be re-wired on the new site. Missing one means broken silence — a form that submits to nowhere, a Meta pixel that stops firing, an enquiry that never reaches your inbox.

4. Define what success looks like 90 days after launch

Three numbers. Organic traffic vs. baseline, conversion rate vs. baseline, one business metric (enquiries, signups, sales). If you don't define this now, you'll spend the next quarter arguing about whether the redesign worked.

SEO — protect what you've built (5–10)

5. Build the 301 redirect map

For every old URL that has either inbound links or organic traffic, decide its new URL. Every old URL needs a destination. Even if a page is being removed, redirect it to the closest topical equivalent — not the homepage. (Homepage-as-default redirect tells Google the old page is gone and the new one is unrelated.)

6. Preserve content depth

If your old "Services" page was 2,400 words and ranked for "web design Sri Lanka," the new version cannot be 600 words of marketing fluff. Google read the old depth as authority. Strip it and the ranking goes with it. Rewrite, don't reduce.

7. Match or improve every page's metadata

Old title tag and meta description. New title tag and meta description. Verify the primary keyword still appears in the new title. Many relaunches lose ranking simply because the new title says "About Us" where the old one said "Web Design Company in Colombo — About Uniix Studio."

8. Preserve internal linking structure

If your old site had 30 internal links pointing to /services/seo/, the new site needs roughly the same. Internal links signal importance to Google. A redesign that "cleans up" the menu often quietly destroys 80% of the internal links to deeper pages.

9. Schema markup on every priority page

Organization, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList on every page. Service schema on each service page. FAQPage on pages with FAQs. BlogPosting on every article. If the old site had no schema, this is a free win. If it did, the new site can't lose it.

10. Re-verify Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster

If the domain stays the same, your existing GSC property still works. But re-verify the sitemap submission on launch day. Submit both the old sitemap (so Google sees what changed) and the new sitemap. Watch the Coverage report daily for the first two weeks.

Technical performance (11–15)

11. Page speed: hit Lighthouse 90+ on every key page

Run Lighthouse on homepage, services index, every individual service page, contact, and any high-traffic blog post. Mobile score, not desktop. Anything under 80 needs work. The 2026 Sri Lankan competitive baseline is 85+ on mobile — anything lower is leaving conversion on the table.

12. Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1

The single most common Sri Lankan website issue: images that load late and push content around. Set explicit width/height on every image. Use next/image (or equivalent) for automatic CLS protection. Test on slow 3G in dev tools.

13. Mobile-first, top to bottom

Open every page on a real Sri Lankan mid-range Android device, not just your iPhone. Check tap targets (minimum 44×44px), font legibility (16px minimum body text), and that nothing horizontally scrolls. Mobile is 70%+ of Sri Lankan traffic; the new site has to win there first.

14. HTTPS, HSTS, and secure cookies

SSL certificate active and auto-renewing. HSTS header set with at least a one-year max-age. All cookies marked Secure and SameSite=Lax minimum. Mixed-content warnings (HTTP resources on an HTTPS page) eliminated.

15. 404 page is helpful, not a dead end

Every relaunch will have a few URLs slip through redirects. The 404 page should: explain what happened, offer a search, link to the most-visited pages, and not look like an error from 2003. A good 404 page recovers about 30% of users who would otherwise leave.

Content quality (16–20)

16. Every page has a single, clear conversion goal

What is the visitor supposed to do on this page? If you can't answer in one sentence, the page is unclear. Every page should have one primary CTA visible above the fold and reinforced at the bottom.

17. Copy reads like a person wrote it

Not corporate speak. Not template language. Read every page aloud. If you sound like a marketing brochure, rewrite. Sri Lankan businesses that sound human win more business than ones that sound polished.

18. Real images, real people, real work

No stock photos of generic offices. Real photography of your team, your office, your work, your clients (with permission). Stock imagery on a Sri Lankan business website in 2026 is read as a trust signal — a negative one.

19. Pricing transparency where possible

Even if you don't publish exact numbers, publish ranges. "Our brand identity engagements typically start at LKR 180,000" is a trust win and an SEO win. We covered why this matters in our website cost Sri Lanka 2026 guide — it's the #1 differentiator for content-led ranking.

20. FAQs on every key page, with FAQPage schema

Five Q&As minimum per service page and per long-form blog post. This is the single highest-leverage AEO (answer engine optimisation) move. Google increasingly pulls FAQ answers into featured snippets. Without schema, Google doesn't know it's an FAQ.

Analytics, forms, and integrations (21–25)

21. Google Analytics 4 firing on every page

Verify in real-time mode that GA4 fires on the homepage, every service page, blog index, individual blog posts, contact page, and the post-submission thank-you page. Check that conversion events (form submit, WhatsApp click, phone click) are registering.

22. Test every form end-to-end

Submit a real test enquiry through every form. Verify:

• The submission saves (or sends to your CRM / inbox)
• A confirmation email reaches the visitor
• An internal notification reaches your team
• The data shows up where it should (HubSpot, Mailchimp, Sheets, wherever)

Forms that "look fine" silently failing for two weeks is the most expensive post-launch bug in this industry.

23. Verify all third-party pixels and widgets

Meta Pixel firing on Page View and Lead events. TikTok pixel if you run TikTok ads. LinkedIn Insight Tag if B2B. Chat widget (Intercom, WhatsApp button) loading and routing correctly. Booking widget (Calendly, etc.) opening and saving bookings to the right calendar.

24. Set up uptime monitoring and form-failure alerts

Free tools (UptimeRobot, BetterStack) cover this. Alert if the site goes down for more than 60 seconds. Alert if a form hasn't received a submission in 7 days (could be normal — could be broken silently).

25. The 24-hour post-launch checklist

Day 1 after launch:

• Submit the new sitemap to GSC and Bing Webmaster
• Test 10 random old URLs through a redirect checker — all should hit the right new URL
• Check GSC Coverage report — investigate any sudden spike in errors
• Send a manual test enquiry through the contact form
• Open the site on a colleague's phone (different network, different OS)
• Verify every social-share preview (WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter) shows the correct image
• Take a baseline Lighthouse score on top 5 pages for week-over-week comparison

Days 2–14 after launch: Daily GSC + GA4 check. Watch for:

• Crawl errors (404 spikes mean the redirect map missed pages)
• Organic traffic drops on previously-ranking pages
• New pages getting indexed (or not — investigate if a key page isn't indexed after 7 days)
• Conversion rate vs. baseline

The single most important rule

Don't launch on a Friday afternoon. Don't launch on a public holiday. Don't launch the day before you fly out for a conference. Launch on a Tuesday morning when you and the agency are both at full attention for the next 48 hours.

Half the redesigns that go wrong go wrong because nobody was watching for the first six hours. The other half go wrong because the brief was unclear — which is a different problem, covered in our guide on how to brief a web designer.

A final calibration

A redesign is not a refresh. A refresh is a coat of paint on a working house. A redesign rebuilds a wall. Both are valid. Both have wildly different risk profiles, timelines, and checklists.

If this list looks too long for what you're planning, you're probably doing a refresh — and a refresh needs perhaps a quarter of this list. If this list looks roughly right, you're doing a real redesign, and skipping any one of these 25 items is exactly the kind of mistake that turns "we launched our new site" into "we lost half our organic traffic and we don't know why."

Two hours on this checklist before launch saves a quarter of damage control after.